Highlights:

• Canal du Midi
• (Almost) Millau Viaduct
• Pont du Gard
• Arles

Weather:

• Warm and fine

Canal du Midi

We left Saint-Hilaire at a reasonable time this morning after breakfast at the hotel, and headed north on the D118. Just south of Carcassonne we hopped on to the A61/E80 (L’Autoroute des Deux Mers)  and headed east towards the Mediterranean Sea. But, on the advice of our host in Saint-Hilaire, after a few kilometres we got off the motorway, drove a little ways north through the town of Trèbes and then followed the D610, a secondary road that in many places crossed over or ran close to the Canal du Midi.

The Canal du Midi must have been one of the wonders of its age when constructed in the late 1600s. It runs for 240 km from Toulouse to the Mediterranean port city of Sète, and together with the Canal de Garonne provides a navigable water connection between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean.

And it’s a beautiful canal too, being now well over 300 years old, with lovely, sweeping trees in many place along its banks, including where it passes through villages and towns such as Marseillette and Puichéric. It’s not used for commercial purposes any more, so all you see on it now is pleasure craft plying its calm waters, or moored to a bank for a serious spot of idling.

The landscape here in southern France is much drier and browner than the Île de France or the Loire or Vézère Valleys had been, or the areas around La Rochelle and Bordeaux. But it has its own, slightly wilder beauty, somehow more familiar to us antipodeans.

At Homps the canal turned southerly while we continued eastwards on what was now the D11. Eventually though we crossed over the canal again near Argeliers and saw a lot more of it for the next 20 km, until it turned away south again after Capestang. We turned right just short of the large town of Beziers, where we crossed over the canal for one last time before joining the A9/E15/E80 autoroute (La Languedocienne) to head northeast along the Mediterannean shore.

Our Saint-Hilaire host had been right – taking a back road had indeed proven a more rewarding experience than staying on the motorways.

Pont du Gard

We followed La Langedocienne northeast, parallelling the Mediterranean shore. The seaside town of Sète, Mediterranean terminus of the Canal du Midi, was visible as we passed it by.

Just past Béziers at Saint Thibéry, Steve had been planning an enormous detour, heading north for some 100km to visit the Millau Viaduct, the tallest vehicular bridge in the world, opened in 2004, and then returning along the same road to La Languedocienne. But when it came time to decide, we felt that a 200km detour wasn’t really that justifiable and would add at least 2 hours to the day’s road travel.  So we gave it a miss.

Making good time, we bypassed Montpellier and then Nîmes. Our next destination would have made a great pair with the Millau Viaduct – the old and the new, as it were. How could anybody (particularly anybody interested in ancient Rome) come to southern France and not visit the Pont du Gard?

This 3-level aqueduct has straddled the River Gardon (not Gard) near the town of Remoulins since at least the middle first century AD. Its survival for 20 centuries almost unscathed has to be some kind of miracle.

You park in the visitors’ car park, paying for the privilege, then walk several hundred metres past the newish museum, around a bend in the river and there it is, rising tall and splendid before you. Its sheer size and height come as a surprise. You have to be impressed by what the Romans could achieve, without all our mod cons.

We wandered around and across it for perhaps an hour, taking photos of it from various angles and of ourselves on it for posterity. Then we packed ourselves back into the car and took off, this time heading back southwest along La Languedocienne to Nimes and then southeast on to the A54/E80 and so into our destination for the next two nights, Arles on the Rhone River.

Arles

To quote AnnMaree’s entry in our handwritten travel diary from that day, “Hotel [in Arles] is a bit of a flea pit – the dreaded double bed [instead of a queen] and broken shower room, and people have smoked in it!”.

Our hotel, the Hotel Régence, is on the northern side of what could be called downtown Arles, i.e. Arles within its ancient walls. The hotel building forms the northwestern corner of an enclosed courtyard totally given over to off-road parking. We were lucky enough to find a free parking space there, as free, legal parking on the nearby streets of Arles was in relatively short supply.

As in Saint-Hilaire, we had booked 2 nights in Arles; the plan was to take a full day to explore the Camargue, the great, triangular marshland surrounding the mouths of the Rhone River between Arles and the Mediterranean Sea to the south.

In the event, we had made good time on the trip to Arles (too good – we would have had time to visit the Millau Viaduct, curse the luck!). We thus found ourselves with a few hours of daylight left to do something with.

The logical thing to do: wander around Arles and see the sights. We visited the town’s famous Roman amphitheatre but didn’t feel like paying to go inside. Next to it was a “Van Gogh house” which we were pretty sure wasn’t the original, just a house tarted up to look like Vincent’s place, so we gave that a miss too.

Walking a little further into the town centre we discovered a small square, the Place du Forum, full of eateries and bars. Here we stopped for a beer. While sitting there, Steve looked up and realised he was sitting pretty much in the exact spot where van Gogh must have sat in order to paint his Café Terrace at Night! The Café Terrace is now called the Cafe van Gogh – modern Arles is something of a parasite feeding on the van Gogh corpus.

Dinner in Arles that night was discovered in a simple little restaurant on the Place Voltaire, another small square not that far from our hotel. The bistro was nothing special to look at, but the food was tasty and they were able to provide an excellent bottle of Côtes du Rhone to go with it, which cheered us up no end.

And tomorrow – the Camargue!

Weather: Fine, not too cool

Highlight: Carcassonne

After breakfast in the hotel at St-Hilaire we drove north the 20 or so km to Carcassonne. Of course we managed to take a wrong turn again with very little effort as we came into town, and AnnMaree at one stage had to remind Steve to drive on the right hand side of the street. With our destination the “Cité” in plain sight on its hill top, we accidentally crossed a bridge over the Aude river which runs through town and got thoroughly lost in the ville basse (lower town). At one stage we were deep in this newer part of the town, getting beeped at by an impatient delivery van driver until Steve could get out of his way. Many frazzled nerves.

Eventually we found our way back over the river and ended up parking in a public car park between river and Cité. Circumnavigating clockwise we came to the main entrance of the Cité on the eastern side, which of course was directly opposite where we’d parked.

Carcassonne’s fortified old city on its hill has to be pretty unique. It dates from the 5th century BC and has undergone many occupations (including the Romans), much destruction and at least one major restoration, in the 19th century under the direction of architect Viollet-le-Duc. It looks like everybody’s idea of what a fortified hilltop town should look like, with its walls and towers and of course a castle.

After checking out the cathedral with its lovely stained glass, we took a guided tour that led us through the castle, which hugs the western wall, then south along the wall and through a couple of towers, finishing up near the ancient amphitheatre in the southwest corner. It turned out to be a good way to get a real feel for the place.

Of course the whole area has been given over to tourists just like us, and there were myriad cafés, restaurants and souvenir shops along the narrow streets and in the little open squares here and there. And being part of France, we still managed to both have a very fine cassoulet, which is the regional speciality, for lunch.

Having had our fill of the Cité by shortly after lunch, we still had a few hours to kill, so we found an exit on the west side (which we’d missed in the morning – well it was a fairly obscure path) and walked over the Pont Vieux (Old Bridge) to the Ville Basse. Here we found a busy square on the Avenue Camille Pelletan (probably Square Gambetta) where we sat in the sun, had a drink and watched life’s rich panoply passing all around us.

Given our past driving efforts we were a bit worried about finding our way out of town and back to St-Hilaire, especially if it got dark. In the end though it proved to be pleasantly easy. We could also see what streets we should have followed when arriving in town this morning.

As for dinner that evening? Well, almost two years have passed since that day’s events (this is being written in July 2009) and neither AnnMaree nor Steve can actually remember where they went or what they had for their evening meal. The most probable answer is that they simply had a quiet, subdued meal in the hotel at St-Hilaire, with less courses to get through than the previous night. But the truth may remain lost in the mists of the past, sadly.

Highlight:

• Saint-Hilaire, Aude Dept

Weather:

• Cool, early fog, occasional showers

We left Le Bugue fairly early on a very foggy morning. First we backtracked up the Vézère valley via the D703 and D706 to Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil. From there we headed out east on the D47 to Sarlat-la-Canéda, then via other secondary roads until we hit the E09/A20 (L’Occitane) autoroute to take us south. It took a fair while to travel the back roads, and it remained foggy throughout. The fog hung around for the first hour on the autoroute too, a bit nerve wracking at times.

Today’s destination was a little place called Saint-Hilaire, about 20 km between Carcassonne and Limoux in the Aude Departement. We were staying there for two nights so we’d have a whole day to explore the famous Old Town in nearby Carcassonne, famous for its medieval walls, castle and buildings.

After a lengthy drive, during which we bypassed the larger towns of Montauban and Toulouse, we turned off the E80/A61 autoroute (L’Autoroute des Deux Mers) at Carcassonne and on to the D118 without mishap. The D118 took us south to arrive in Saint-Hilaire in the early afternoon.

By driving along this small village’s main street we very soon found our hotel, Le Clos Saint Hilaire. It’s a converted former manor house, very grand in a slightly shabby and comfortable way – it had been renovated in 2006. Our host and hostess spoke very little English but Steve and the host managed to make themselves understood to each other with a bit of “Franglais”. The off-road parking was in a big old shed across the street, so the car was under cover for the night. Our room was big and roomy with a heater, a king-sized bed and a view out the back windows of the village and the mountains beyond.

After unpacking (it’s such a pleasure staying in a place more than one night in a row) we opted to head out and look around town. The first placed we checked out was the abbey, which dates back to the 8th century and has a gorgeous cloister. We then found our way through to a back street and up to the village cemetery, one of the highest points in the village.

After returning to the hotel, we decided it would be a good idea to shoot off south to Limoux, a slightly larger town about 30 km south of Saint Hilaire, and see if we could find ourselves some good maps of Carcassonne in readiness for tomorrow’s adventure. We drove around Limoux until we spotted a tourist information sign, parked a little further on and walked back until we found the tourist office in a local museum. The people in there were very helpful (given that we just wanted information about Carcassonne, not Limoux itself – guess they’re used to that) and gave us two useful street maps of their big neighbour.

Dinner that night in the hotel. There was a large party of locals taking up most of the restaurant and enjoying a feast of some kind. Our hostess acted as waiter, wearing a black leather dress, of all things. We sat separately and went for the 5 course menu and it was fantastic. Steve had a venison casserole with a separate dish of chestnut purée and cheese. AnnMaree had small pieces of monkfish cooked with mushroom and a beautiful sauce. Her dessert was an apple and pear tatin and she very quickly declared it one of the best desserts she’s ever eaten. The excellent wine was from the local Limoux region. A sublime gustatory experience all around to finish off the day.

Highlight

• Lascaux

Weather

• Cloudy, cool

Last thing before leaving the hotel in St-Émilion, we went to the local Maison du Vin and bought three bottles of the local wine, for drinking when we get to Juan-les-Pins next week. AnnMaree would have loved to take some back to Australia but we figured we probably wouldn’t get them through Brisbane airport security. (Turned out that we would be able to get a couple of them home, by wrapping them in clothing and packing one each in our respective suitcases. They didn’t last that long after we got home, sadly.) The three bottles are all Chateau Grand Cru from different years – as you can imagine we were looking forward to sampling them.

We drove out of St-Émilion northwards (thankfully avoiding having to retrace our steps from yesterday), and stopped to get some petrol at a place just a few hundred meters out of town. At first we followed a number of back roads north and northeast, eventually emerging on to the E70 (La Transeuropéenne) autoroute, which took us generally eastwards well over 100 km. At Exit 17 we left the autoroute behind us and headed southwards down the D65, D67 and on to the D704 that took us into the local town of Montignac on the Vézère River.

Here we stopped for lunch, a couple of scrumptious bread rolls stuffed with meat and salad bought in a shop in the town’s narrow main street. How we leave French bread! Leaving the Renault in a public car park by the river, we were able to find some steps down to the grassy river bank where we could eat our lunch and watch the dark water busily flowing by.

Then it was across the river and up a hill only a kilometre out of town to the Lascaux caves where prehistoric rock paintings were discovered in the 1940s. The original cave has been closed since the 1960s when they noticed the damage being done to the paintings by the passage and exhalations of visitors. But a replica of the best bits, Lascaux II, has been constructed nearby so tourists can still see what the originals look like.

All the wall paintings are of animals: bulls, horses, deer. Experts don’t know exactly how old they are but are guessing about 7,000 BC. They’re also not sure why the painters depicted animals or why they went to such trouble. Perhaps the most popular theory is that they had religious significance. They were preserved because the entrance to the cave was blocked off by a landslip at some later date, which allowed for constant temperature and humidity inside.

After waiting about an hour and then going on the mandatory guided tour through Lascaux II (Steve found it uncomfortably claustrophobic, which is probably intentional) we left there and continued along the D706 as it followed the Vézère valley southwest. This whole valley is awash with prehistoric sites and artifacts, including Le Thot and Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil. It was in the Cro Magnon cave at Les Eyzies that the first remains of Cro Magnon man were discovered back in the 19th century.

Just a few kilometres short of where the Vezere flows into the Dordogne River is the largish town of Le Bugue. Here, where the Rue du Cingle heads southwest out of town, and after only getting a little bit lost this time, we found our hotel, the Hotel Restaurant Le Cygne. It’s a lovely, old, three-storey stone place with a ton of charm, and the hosts Isabelle and Christophe, who had only recently taken over ownership, were very friendly and helpful. Our room had walls of deep blue and really had something of the feeling of a dark cave itself – lovely for sleeping in.

After settling in, it was still only mid-afternoon so we opted to go for a walk around the town. It had the look of a fairly prosperous country town, with plenty of activity on the streets and in the shops along the main thoroughfare. At one point a stream flows swiftly along beside the street and through some back yards. Some of the tall houses had eye catching shapes too. All very picturesque and a pleasant prelude to dinner.

We ate that night in the hotel’s restaurant. The food was good to very good, but the most memorable part of the meal was the wine, a very nice wine from the local Bergerac wine region. We were making it a habit to drink wine from the local region as we travelled throughout France – a habit that was paying off handsomely for us.

And then to bed, relatively early. Tomorrow was to be a long day of travel, as we headed southeast towards our next destination, Carcassonne.

Highlights

• Saint Émilion

Weather

• Cold and sunny

Negotiated our way to a shopping mall on the way out of La Rochelle so we could buy warm jackets. Then back to the autoroute to head south. Missed the connection to the local road to St. Émilion so we had to do a complete circuit (about 30km) of the Bordeaux ring road – compulsory at least once on every road trip, I should imagine!

Found our way to St. Émilion – a tiny medieval hill town with a nightmare collection of narrow, one way streets including Rue Guadet, its main street. We drove right through the village along Rue Guadet without spotting our hotel, the Hôtel au Logis des Remparts, which was supposed to be located on it. At the top end of town is a large public car park, so we stashed the Clio there and walked back into town, spotting the hotel about 200 metres back.

The lady on reception booked us in – though when we learned that the room only had a double bed we were most willing (after last night’s bed in La Rochelle) to pay €30 extra and upgrade to a room with a queen sized bed.  She advised us about how to get into the hotel car park – it meant doubling back to the hotel somehow as the car park entrance was right next to it, on the downhill side.

We dare not say too much about our attempts to drive back to the hotel, lest the memory of the nightmare destroys our minds! Suffice to say that we grew far too familiar with several more St Émilion streets, both in the town and through the surrounding, vineyard wreathed countryside. Steve in particular became totally disoriented at one point, but thankfully AnnMaree kept slightly more wits about her and pointed us in the right direction. In the end we found ourselves back down at the main road at the bottom of the hill, the D670, where we’d started. From there we could retrace our steps back up and along Rue Guadet and into the car park, much relieved and roundly cursing medieval French town streets.

After unloading the Clio and laying claim to our hotel room, we wandered around the nearer parts of the town for a while, exploring some of the back streets and peering in shop windows (especially wine shops).

St Émilion is very pretty, with some amazing views of the surrounding countryside too, but something of a tourist trap. It’s obviously geared towards selling very expensive wine to wealthy Americans. Not that we didn’t manage to find some rather nice wine for ourselves at a slightly more reasonable price next morning, mind you.

At one point we passed a side street leading steeply down to a lower part of the town, but chose not to go down it, if only to avoid the climb back up. In retrospect it was a pity we didn’t wander down there, as it leads to the square in front of St Émilion’s famous monolithic church – dug into a limestone cliff.

Spotting an Internet café only a few doors along from the hotel, it seemed like a good time to catch up on our email, see how Anna Landy was going with the cats, and so forth. This place had two things going for it: English language keyboards, and wine for sale by the (expensive) glass. There were quite a few surfers already in there but still enough room for us to book a PC for an hour and do our thing.

Evening came after a dusty sunset. Although we had no booking we were able, after a short wait, to wangle a table for two in L’Envers du Decor, a restaurant in the narrow, pedestrianised Rue du Clocher, not far from our hotel. Once again, great food accompanied by a fantastic wine from the local region (well, it was Saint Émilion after all). The waiter poured our selected wine from the bottle into a decanter that looked like a giant wine glass – the only place in France where we had this done for us, or indeed saw it done.

Then it was a quick, leisurely stroll (in our new, warm jackets) back to the hotel and a luxurious sleep.

Highlights

• Chateau de Chenonceau
• La Rochelle

Weather

• Very cold, about 0° – 10°. The coldest day of our entire trip.

We left Blois after wiping ice off the Clio’s windscreen – it was still only 2° at 10.30am.

Chenonceau

Chateau de Chenonceau

Crossing back over to the left (south bank) of the Loire, we made our way southwest by minor roads, the D751, D764 and D176, passing through the small towns of Sambin, Pontlevoy and Montrichard.

View of the Cher from the chateau

Our destination, Chenonceau – one of the Loire Valley’s most picturesque chateaux, with a wing built on a bridge over the adjacent Cher, a tributary of the Loire. The bridge was built by Diane de Poitiers, mistress of French king Henri II, while the grand gallery built on top of it was finished by his widow, Catherine de’ Medici, after she forced Diane to swap the chateau for another, less spectacular number.

The morning was damn near freezing, especially when a breeze blew. It must have been only about 8° at midday.

La Rochelle

After a very pleasant, if rather cool, wander through the chateau and its beautiful gardens we left for the Atlantic coastal city of La Rochelle. This time we followed mostly autoroutes (the A85 and the A10, then the E601/N11 all the way into town) rather than back roads, and made good time.

Towers, La Rochelle

Autoroutes are definitely less scary than lesser roads in France. We managed to get lost yet again once we were in the actual town – we were on the correct street, but then suddenly we weren’t! It’s not made any easier by the fact the street signs are positioned way up high on the walls of houses (presumably so they can’t be damaged or stolen), and are difficult to spot from inside a car. Anyway as we were driving around somewhat aimlessly we managed to spot a familiar street name again and so found our way to the hotel by blind good fortune.

The hotel we had pre-booked in La Rochelle, the Hotel Savary, was one of the cheaper hotels we stayed in, and it showed. It was a bit daggy – just a double bed instead of a queen, a broken shower head, that sort of thing. But you get what you pay for, so we put up with it, knowing we’d be out of there next morning anyway.

Being in an Atlantic port, AnnMaree was highly desirous of trying out the local seafood, especially the oysters. The friendly young hotel staff recommended the Restaurant André, on the Rue de Saint-Jean du Perot  in town, for good seafood. And they were right. AnnMaree finally got to try the local oysters. We counted 7 nationalities (based on language being spoken) in our small section of a pretty large restaurant – U.S., Germans, Poms, Dutch, Americans and French, not to mention us Aussies.

La Rochelle is obviously a tourist haunt – hard to imagine how packed it must get in summer, given how busy it was in mid-Autumn. To judge by the people we saw in the streets and parks on our walks to and from town, a lot of retirees live here.

After dinner we walked home the kilometre or so through the dark and cold, promising ourselves to see if we couldn’t find ourselves some warmer jackets tomorrow.

Highlights

• Train trip from Paris to Orleans
• Chambord Chateau
• Dinner at Blois

Weather

• Remaining fine and cold

Paris to Orléans

A slightly nerve racking day today. Regretfully leaving the Hotel Residence Henri IV, and lugging our luggage with us, we caught the Metro the couple of stations to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Despite the strike we had no trouble in booking a couple of tickets for the hour-long trip to Orléans. (Somewhat daringly we hadn’t pre-booked the tickets, so as to leave our options open.)

Here’s an odd thing about our train – the seat numbers weren’t visible until they lit up – and they didn’t light up until about 10 minutes before the train left. So nobody knew where to sit when they got on, then followed by a general hubbub and chaos as people moved to their appointed seats once the power came on. Let’s hope this situation was due to the lingering effects of the great strike; if it’s normal practice, it’s very strange and non-user friendly, to say the least.

Getting off at Orléans, we found that we had to drag our suitcase from the station about two kilometres, including a 300 metre long tunnel under the extensive rail yards, until we were able to find the Avis car rental place on Rue André Dessaux. Note to selves – ensure we get picked up from the station by somebody the next time we make this kind of arrangement.

Picking up the car went fairly smoothly despite the lack of a common language. The only unexpected thing was that we were given a Renault Clio rather than the slightly larger Renault Megane. The Clio still had enough room in the boot and the back seat for our gear, so we assumed this was covered by the “Renault Megane or similar” bit in the rental contract.

(In the end we were quite glad to have the Clio. That little car cheefully got us around much of France over the next week without a complaint, and cheaply too – we only needed 3 tanks of diesel for the whole trip of over 1400 km.)

Then it was time for our first drive in a left-hand drive car on the “wrong” side of the road, in a city we didn’t have a clue about. Steve had printed out some Google maps which got us out of Orléans, across the Loire River (our first view of it) and on to the D951 heading southwest for Chambord. So far, so good!

Chambord

Chateau de Chambord

The Chateau de Chambord, set amidst its canals and vast, forested estate, is totally larger than life – and freezing as. It’s hard to imagine how all those generations of French kings and queens handled the cold, despite the huge fireplaces. The castle is set in grounds the size of inner Paris – they used them for hunting.

We wandered all over the building, from the ground floor to the roof, in awe at the way the French royalty lived. The highlights are the roof line, designed to resemble the skyline of old Constantinople, and the double-helix stairwell which may or may not have been designed by Leonardo da Vinci during his final years in France.

Blois

Cat on balcony, Blois

After leaving Chambord it was only a short skip southwest to the town of Blois, located on the Loire River. We had pre-booked accommodation here, at the Hotel Le Medicis on Allée Francois 1er, on the western outskirts of downtown Blois.

Well, we managed to come in to central Blois on the wrong bridge across the Loire and then proceeded to get totally lost in the maze of narrow, medieval streets. (This would come to be a common occurrence upon driving into French towns of any size for the rest of the week.) Steve found the way back to the river (the only landmark whose position we were sure of) and then we were able to take the correct bridge and find our way to the hotel. It was a very unsettling experience – we were both relieved to see the hotel’s facade, very recognisable from the photos of it we’d seen on the web.

Hotel Le Medicis, Blois

After a late afternoon walk into town to use the services of an appropriate automatic telling machine, we had a wonderful meal at the hotel restaurant (one of the reasons we chose it). The meal was quite formal, with a headwaiter and underwaiters, but not so much as to make us uncomfortable. We chose our first ever Loire Valley wine to go with it – très yum, with food to match.

Our room was air conditioned and, after a day of driving on French roads, our sleep well-earned! Thus ended our first day on the (French) road.

Today’s highlight

• Open bus tour

Weather

• Cold, minimum 4°, maximum 13°

AnnMaree on the Open Tour bus

Today we really indulged our touristy inclinations and took a 2 hour tour on a converted double decker bus provided by Open Tour. Even though the sun was out it was freezing on the open top level (see photo at left), but we stuck it out and stayed up there the whole time. It took us around the Eiffel Tower and various streets on the Right Bank – up the Champs Elysées and around the Arc de Triomphe. It followed a loop so we could get off where we got on, on the Ile de la Cité near Notre Dame. Once off we needed to thaw out so we headed back to the hotel, grabbing a long filled roll each on the way – very nice with a beer we had bought from the local store.

Eiffel Tower from the bus

Then it was time to tackle the local laundrette, a couple of blocks down the Rue des Bernardins – with its signs and instructions all in French of course. Luckily a locally based Kiwi rescued us and explained the rather complicated routine.

That task done it was off to the internet cafe, @z Net, up the hill on nearby Rue Descartes, to check for emails. Nothing from Irene yet about how we’re going to get into their unit down in Juan-les-Pins in Week 3 – hope they can make another arrangement for us to pick up the keys. Trust the caretaker to go on holidays in the very week we’ll be there!

Pont Neuf from the bus

For dinner that night we headed up to Rue Mouffetard one final time, and found a semi-fancy restaurant with low ceilings and a cosy feel to it which Steve in particular found very enjoyable. The food and wine were good, although not memorable in any particular way.

And that’s how our last day in Paris came to an end. Somehow we didn’t really do everything we could have done – no day trip to Giverny, for instance. Still, we packed as much in as we could handle, given the circumstances. It just means there’s plenty more for us to do on our next trip here!

Today’s highlights

• Musée Rodin
• Les Invalides – Napoleon’s tomb and the Military museum

Weather

• Freezing, minimum 4°, maximum 12°

The strike was still going, but some trains were running. We had a fairly long wait to get a train, and we were then packed in like sardines. AnnMaree felt like a subway traveller in Tokyo. A Frenchwoman, recognising us as tourists (gee, I wonder how?), apologised for the strike as we got off at Varenne station. We just laughed and shrugged it off.

Musée Rodin

The Gates of Hell, Musee Rodin

We both agree that the Musée Rodin is one of our favourite places to visit in Paris. Both of us had been to it on separate visits in the distant past, so it was nice to confirm our previous judgements with another visit.

The Hôtel Biron, the grand house containing most of the works of Rodin that are on display, plus a number of paintings by van Gogh and Renoir, stands by itself in stately splendour amidst the grounds. It holds Rodin’s more life-sized works. Steve’s favourite is the bust of the goddess Athena wearing the Parthenon as a hat… The house is surrounded on all sides by gardens that contain many of Rodin’s more monumental works – the Thinker, the Gates of Hell, and the Burghers of Calais are all in the smaller garden on the northern side between the front of the house and the entrance building.

Musee Rodin, rear facade

Out the back is a much larger and more formal garden, with just a few, lesser known works interspersed among the shrubbery down the sides, and a circular pool at the end of the long lawn, furthest from the house. You could hear the traffic passing on the Boulevard des Invalides outside, and in a couple of places spot the golden dome of the Invalides on the other side of the street, but it might as well have been a million kilométres away.

Les Invalides

Napoleon's sarcophagus, les Invalides

Anyway, after that refreshing interlude, we traipsed down the boulevard to the rue de Grenelle, which runs along the front (northern) side of Les Invalides. We spent a couple of hours wandering around the various courts and buildings that make up this somewhat bewildering complex.

Church, Invalides, from Musee Rodin

Naturally we visited Napoleon’s final resting place, the massive red porphyry sarcophagus directly under that beautiful, gilded dome sitting atop the Cathédrale Saint-Louis des Invalides, the church in the centre of the Invalides complex. We also had quite a good look through the Musée de l’Armée, which covers French involvement in various wars from ancient times to World War II.

Evening

AnnMaree was still feeling a bit under the weather today, but for some reason we went out for dinner, ending up in a rather unprepossessing, smoky place down towards the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Steve had some very ordinary chicken, and AnnMaree had some desultory soup. We were fairly happy to depart that place, go back to the hotel and watch the 2007 Rugby World Cup final, which South Africa won without scoring a single try. Exciting game, that Rugby.

Highlights

• The Louvre

Weather

• Fine and cold

Desperate to get in a day at the Louvre during our week here, we weren’t sure if the Métro would be running today, thanks to the strike. Our concierge assured us, based on his reading of the paper, that Métro services would be intermittent at best and the Louvre would probably be closed.

Fortunately AnnMaree didn’t believe him, and just as well. All up, we waited no more than 2 minutes for a train to arrive at the Cluny-La Sorbonne station; and the Louvre opened 15 minutes after we arrived.

However by this time poor AnnMaree had come down with one of her horrible head colds, where her nose runs incessantly for 3 or 4 days. But she persevered because we were both absolutely determined to see the Louvre at least once on this visit. And after all, how many times do you get to visit Paris in your lifetime? You’ve got to make the most of your time here, regardless of how you’re feeling.

Glass pyramid, the Louvre

After descending into the maelstrom that is the underground lobby beneath I.M. Pei’s famous glass pyramid, we each hired an audioguide to carry around with us. You look for a number below the work on the wall, type the number into the audioguide and it gives you an audio description of it via earphones.

Our first stop was the underground remains of the original, 12th century, square fortress that occupied part of the site of the modern Louvre. You basically walk through what was once the moat to view the lowest courses of the original castle’s stonework, all that’s now left of it.

Then we hit the Egyptian antiquities section in the Sully wing – a favourite area for both of us. We spent a fruitful couple of hours there, observing the statues of lions and cats, pharaohs seated and standing, the goddess Hathor, and heaps more.

Statues of Richelieu and friends, the Louvre

Then lunch in the restaurant on the upper floor of the Richelieu wing. We could look out at the statues of the Red Eminence and a few of his mates lining the balustrade of the balcony next door to the restaurant, overlooking the Cour Napoléon, the Louvre courtyard that is open at its western end to the Tuileries. (The courtyard to the east, surrounded on all 4 sides by wings of the Louvre is the Cour Carrée.) The food was average, typical for a tourist attraction, though as usual the bread was divine.

After lunch we went briefly to the Near Eastern antiquities section so Steve got to see:

• some of the statues of Gudea, prince of the city state of Lagash in ancient Mesopotamia during the 22nd century B.C. The Louvre has 11 of the 27 statues of Gudea discovered so far.
• the giant genies (winged bulls with human heads) that once adorned Assyrian city gateways
• the amazing, unexpectedly enormous column capital, adorned with the heads and forequarters of bulls at each side,  from the apadana or audience hall of the palace of the ancient Persian Empire’s Great Kings at Persepolis, in what is now southern Iran

Mona Lisa room, Louvre

Then it was the pilgrimage to the Painting section, and in particular, of course, the Mona Lisa. Not that we bothered trying to get anywhere near her, with so many other pilgrims clustered around her. So we stood just inside the doorway to the room where the painting is centrally displayed and took a photo of the chaos.

Not that La Gioconda is the only work worth looking at in the Painting section, where you have so many of the best known works of the greatest French painters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries – David, Gericault, Delacroix, Ingres, and Gros. How heart-clenchingly amazing to see The Death of Sardanapaulus, Liberty Leading the People, The Raft of the Medusa, and La Grande Odalisque, all in one place!

Delacroix, Liberty leading the people

Of course, with only one day available, we barely “touched the sides” of the Louvre. I’ve always heard and said that you need 3 full days to see all 35,000 items on display. But by mid-afternoon we both needed to rest our feet, and AnnMaree was in dire need of a good lie-down due to her cold. Despite the cold weather and uncertain transport the place was still seething with people when we left. Imagine what it’s like in summer.

So we came back to good old Hotel Residence Henri IV well before dark and read until dinner time. And instead of going out to dine, Steve fetched takeaway from the Indian place where we went a couple of nights earlier.

So ended Day 5 of our mostly delightful Paris sojourn – weather and ill health notwithstanding.